1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to speech processing and more specifically to reusing existing spoken dialog data to generate a new natural language spoken dialog system.
2. Introduction
Natural language spoken dialog systems receive spoken language as input, analyze the received spoken language input to derive meaning from the input, and perform some action, which may include generating speech, based on the meaning derived from the input. Building natural language spoken dialog systems requires large amounts of human intervention. For example, a number of recorded speech utterances may require manual transcription and labeling for the system to reach a useful level of performance for operational service. In addition, the design of such complex systems typically includes a human being, such as, a User Experience (UE) expert to manually analyze and define system core functionalities, such as, a system's semantic scope (call-types and named entities) and a dialog manager strategy, which will drive the human-machine interaction. This approach to building natural language spoken dialog systems is extensive and error prone because it involves the UE expert making non-trivial design decisions, the results of which can only be evaluated after the actual system deployment. Thus, a complex system may require the UE expert to define the system's core functionalities via several design cycles that may include defining or redefining the core functionalities, deploying the system, and analyzing the performance of the system. Moreover, scalability is compromised by time, costs and the high level of UE know-how needed to reach a consistent design. A new approach that reduces the amount of human intervention required to build a natural language spoken dialog system is desired.